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Russian forces have increased their shelling of Avdiivka, a town in eastern Ukraine, as Moscow seeks to launch a broader offensive against a heavily defended front line in the Donbass region, Ukrainian officials said.
While the battle for the town of Bakhmut has become the main focus of Russian attempts to secure territory in the region, Avdiivka is one of several areas where Moscow is stepping up its attacks along the 160-mile crescent-shaped front line to the east. Say Ukrainian officials.
For weeks, Russia has been sending tens of thousands of soldiers into battles in eastern Ukraine to drive the Ukrainians out of well-fortified positions. The deadliest fighting has taken place in and around Bakhmut, where both sides are trying to demote the other in a months-long battle of attrition, but the Ukrainian military general staff routinely reports more than 100 attempts by Russian forces to breach their defenses each day.
Many of the one-on-one battles relate to both important roads and supply lines and control of now-ruined towns and villages. The length of the Battle of Avdiivka shows how difficult it was for Russian forces to gain further ground in the east, where both armies have established significant defenses and Ukraine has strengthened its positions.
Russian troops fired two grenades at an abandoned school in the city on Monday, killing a local woman, according to a post by Andriy Yermak, head of Ukraine’s presidential office, on social messaging app Telegram. He posted two photos of a three-story building that had been reduced to rubble. Russian forces also fired three more artillery shells at the city, according to the head of Ukraine’s regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, who wrote on Telegram.
There was no independent confirmation of the reports. The city had 31,000 inhabitants before the war, but almost all residents fled. Mr Kyrylenko said Russia was also shelling nearby communities.
Mr Kyrylenko said Russia’s attacks included the use of cluster munitions, which rights groups say can cause disproportionate harm to civilians. His account could not be independently verified.
Ukraine’s General Staff said in a daily report that its forces repelled attacks in the city itself and at least five nearby settlements. The attacks form a pattern of destruction, according to other officials.
Russia “has hit the villages nearby and on the way to the city massively over the past week,” Vitaliy Barabash, head of Avdiivka’s military administration, told Ukrainian television over the weekend.
“These villages will be wiped out,” Mr Barabash said. He said Russian forces “appeared to have tried to cut off Avdiivka, disrupting logistics, supply of personnel and ammunition,” likely believing the city was housing “a lot of personnel, our people.” He added that Russian fighters attacked a road leading to the city from a large industrial plant.
Videos and photos from Avdiivka, posted to social media in recent weeks, showed a city devastated by shells, even by the standards of other hard-hit places in a region where fighting has raged since Russia before one year began his large-scale invasion of Ukraine. In one, a fire burned in an abandoned industrial building, a large crater stood in a street covered in debris, and dozens of houses and many apartment blocks had windows blown out. Even trees appeared blackened. The material has not been independently confirmed.
Pro-Russian separatists occupied Avdiivka for a few months in 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and established breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two provinces that make up Donbass. Ukrainian troops expelled the separatists from Avdiivka in July of the same year.
Over the weekend, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, reported a Russian claim that Moscow forces had captured Sjeverne and Kamianka, settlements east and west of Avdiivka. The Ukrainian military denied the claims and there was no independent confirmation.